BOXING: A Dream Destroyed; Bowe Won Championships, but He Lost His Family

Published: July 5, 1998

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''He always liked to joke and play,'' said Moe Sims, a family friend, who was a father figure to the young Bowe. ''It was real tough to get him to be serious. In a funny sort of way, he used playing and joking to boost his confidence. He always felt it made him a better fighter.''

Bowe was good from the beginning, winning three Golden Gloves titles as a teen-ager.

''I remember when he won the Golden Gloves championship and he was getting the award, he got his first suit,'' Sims said. ''He couldn't tie the tie. I helped him tie it. He said, 'I've never had anyone to do that for me.' I always tried to make him feel proud of himself.''

Almost everyone could be charmed by Bowe, who used to protectively walk his mother to and from the factory where she worked. Eddie Futch, the legendary trainer who eventually worked Bowe's corner, said he had heard of Bowe's care for his mother and concluded, ''This is a guy with a lot of character.'' Indeed, Judy Bowe, then 15, fell in love with a boy she described as distinctive.

''He didn't appear to be like the other guys in the neighborhood, the drug dealers and fast talkers with girls all over the place,'' said Judy, who married Bowe on April 27, 1988, when she was 21. ''He was different.''

Bowe became only the second child in his family to graduate from high school when he got his diploma from Thomas Jefferson High School. And he won a silver medal at the Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, in October 1988.

The news media embraced Bowe, perhaps in part because reporters and broadcasters had wearied of the unabashedly violent Tyson, who as a youth had mugged people like Dorothy Bowe. Bowe's tales of guarding his mother, his knack for doing impressions and eliciting laughs, were played prominently in profiles of the boxer.

Still, for all the accomplishments and accolades, Bowe was an exasperating project. Sims had to wake an oversleeping Bowe so that he did not miss his flight to Seoul in 1988. And Bowe, he said, never trained particularly hard.

''He was the baby boy,'' Sims said. ''He was the only one in his family to have any success. He was the only one to ever work for a living. There could have been a discipline problem there, because he was always used to getting his way.''

And Futch, once he met Bowe, had his own immediate questions.

''When I first met him, I saw what the problem was,'' said Futch, who wound up training Bowe for eight years. ''He was 21 years old, but he was just a big kid. Everybody thought he was a man, but he was a boy. He had the mental maturity of a 16-year-old.''

He had a great jab, though, and enough toughness, or pure talent, to succeed in the ring. Four years after turning pro, he was a champion, winning a 12-round decision over Holyfield in November 1992. Newman produced a lucrative HBO contract and a multimillion-dollar endorsement deal with Fila, an athletic apparel company.

A Loving Persona, But Private Demons

The image is still locked in Judy Bowe's mind: her husband, while in training for a fight three years ago, disciplining their oldest son, J. R., who was 8 years old at the time. She said the fighter ripped the cord from the television in his hotel suite, and, using duct tape, bound J.R.'s hands and feet, eventually whipping him with the cord.

Certainly, it is an image that runs counter to Bowe's public persona, that of the loving man who married his high school sweetheart and who often said he could not train seriously because he missed his children.

But for Judy Bowe, it was consistent with the darker side of Bowe that she knew well.

''Riddick knocked me out in front of my 3-year-old last April,'' she said. ''I was out cold for several minutes. It never fazed Riddick. He thought nothing of it.''

Newman, Bowe's manager, declined to talk in detail about Judy Bowe's portrait of her husband. He said he believed that Judy Bowe and her lawyer, Barbara Gorinson, were eager to disparage Bowe in order to exact a better financial settlement in the couple's divorce proceeding. But Newman did not deny that Bowe had been physically abusive to his wife.

''Riddick, if he had his way right now, would erase whatever pain that he has caused his wife and family and they'd be together as they have been in the best of times, as a big happy family,'' Newman said.

But Judy Bowe's depiction of her husband is grim. She said that over the years, with his extended family and millions of dollars in purses, Bowe had become obsessed with issues of control. He used the financial resources to manipulate those around him and resorted to violence when people did not do as he wished.

As the sole source of income for his family, Bowe moved everyone to Fort Washington, Md., a Washington suburb, in 1990, in part to be near his manager, Newman. Judy Bowe said her husband bought houses on his street for his mother, her mother, three of his sisters and a niece and gave them stipends of $1,000 a month to get them off welfare. But, said the boxer's wife, Bowe ''punishes them by withholding money from them whenever they do something he doesn't like.''